Men's Rights ~ Feminism should be about equality--for males too.

Commentary

Cathy Young, 11.19.09, 10:30 AM ET

Earlier this month DoubleX, Slate's short-lived female-oriented publication (launched six months ago and about to be folded back into the parent site as a women's section), ran an article ringing the alarm about the dire threat posed by the power of the men's rights movement. But the article, written by New York-based freelance writer Kathryn Joyce and titled "Men's Rights' Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective," says more about the state of feminism--and journalistic bias--than it does about men's groups.

Joyce's indictment is directed at a loose network of activists seeking to raise awareness and change policy on such issues as false accusations of domestic violence, the plight of divorced fathers denied access to children and domestic abuse of men. In her view, groups such as RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting) and individuals like columnist and radio talk show host Glenn Sacks are merely "respectable" and "savvy" faces for what is actually an anti-female backlash from "angry white men."

As proof of this underlying misogyny, Joyce asserts that men who commit "acts of violence perceived to be in opposition to a feminist status quo" are routinely lionized in the men's movement. This claim is purportedly backed up with a reference that, in fact, does not in any way support it: an article in Foreign Policy about the decline of male dominance around the globe. Joyce's one specific example is that the diary of George Sodini, a Pittsburgh man who opened fire on women in a gym in retaliation for feeling rejected by women, was reposted online by the blogger "Angry Harry" as a wake-up call to the Western world that "it cannot continue to treat men so appallingly and get away with it." But does this have anything to do with more mainstream men's rights groups? The original version of the article claimed that Sacks, who called "Harry" an "idiot" in his interview with Joyce, nonetheless "cautiously defends" the blogger; DoubleX later ran a correction on this point.

Sacks himself admits to Joyce that the men's movement has a "not-insubstantial lunatic fringe." Yet in her eyes, even the mainstream men's groups are promoting a dangerous agenda, above all infiltrating mainstream opinion with the view that reports of domestic violence are exaggerated and that a lot of spousal abuse is female-perpetrated. The latter claim, Joyce asserts, comes from "a small group of social scientists" led by "sociologist Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire, who has written extensively on female violence." (In fact, Straus, founder of the renowned Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, is a pre-eminent scholar on family violence in general and was the first to conduct national surveys on the prevalence of wife-beating.)

Joyce repeats common critiques of Straus' research: For instance, he equates "a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs" or "a single act of female violence with years of male abuse." Yet these charges have been long refuted: Straus' studies measure the frequency of violence and specifically inquire about which partner initiated the physical violence. Furthermore, Joyce fails to mention that virtually all social scientists studying domestic violence, including self-identified feminists such as University of Pittsburgh psychologist Irene Frieze, find high rates of mutual aggression.

Reviews of hundreds of existing studies, such as one conducted by University of Central Lancashire psychologist John Archer in a 2000 article in Psychological Bulletin, have found that at least in Western countries, women are as likely to initiate partner violence as men. While the consequences to women are more severe--they are twice as likely to report injuries and about three times more likely to fear an abusive spouse--these findings also show that men hardly escape unscathed. Joyce claims that "Straus' research is starting to move public opinion," but in fact, some of the strongest recent challenges to the conventional feminist view of domestic violence--as almost invariably involving female victims and male batterers--come from female scholars like New York University psychologist Linda Mills.

Contrary to Joyce's claims, these challenges, so far, have made very limited inroads into public opinion. One of her examples of the scary power of men's rights groups is that "a Los Angeles conference this July dedicated to discussing male victims of domestic violence, 'From Ideology to Inclusion 2009: New Directions in Domestic Violence Research and Intervention,' received positive mainstream press for its 'inclusive' efforts.'" In fact, the conference--which featured leading researchers on domestic violence from several countries, half of them women, and focused on much more than just male victims--received virtually no mainstream press coverage. One of the very few exceptions was a column I wrote for The Boston Globe, also reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Whatever minor successes men's groups may have achieved, the reality is that public policy on domestic violence in the U.S. is heavily dominated by feminist advocacy groups. For the most part, these groups embrace a rigid orthodoxy that treats domestic violence as male terrorism against women, rooted in patriarchal power and intended to enforce it. They also have a record of making grotesquely exaggerated, thoroughly debunked claims about an epidemic of violence against women--for instance, that battering causes more hospital visits by women every year than car accidents, muggings and cancer combined.

These advocacy groups practically designed the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, and they dominate the state coalitions against domestic violence to which local domestic violence programs must belong in order to qualify for federal funds. As a result of the advocates' influence, federal assistance is denied to programs that offer joint counseling to couples in which there is domestic violence, and court-mandated treatment for violent men downplays drug and alcohol abuse (since it's all about the patriarchy).

Against the backdrop of this enforced party line, Joyce is alarmed by the smallest signs that men's rights groups may be gaining even a modest voice in framing domestic violence policy. She points out that in a few states, men's rights activists have succeeded in "criminalizing false claims of domestic violence in custody cases" (this is apparently meant to be a bad thing) and "winning rulings that women-only shelters are discriminatory" (in fact, the California Court of Appeals ruled last year that state-funded domestic violence programs that refuse to provide service to abused men violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection, but also emphasized that the services need not be identical and coed shelters are not required).

To bolster her case, Joyce consistently quotes advocates--or scholars explicitly allied with the advocacy movement, such as Edward Gondolf of the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Research and Training Institute--to discredit the claims of the men's movement. She also repeats uncorroborated allegations that many leaders of the movement are themselves abusers, but offers only one specific example: eccentric British activist Jason Hatch, who once scaled Buckingham Palace in a Batman costume to protest injustices against fathers, and who was taken to court for allegedly threatening one of his ex-wives during a custody dispute.

The article is laced with the presumption that, with regard to both general data and individual cases, any charge of domestic violence made by a woman against a man must be true.

One case Joyce uses to illustrate her thesis is that of Genia Shockome, who claimed to have been severely battered by her ex-husband Tim and lost custody of her two children after being accused of intentionally alienating them from their father. Yet Joyce never mentions that Shockome's claims of violent abuse were unsupported by any evidence, that she herself did not mention any abuse in her initial divorce complaint, or that three custody evaluators--including a feminist psychologist who had worked with the Battered Women's Justice Center at Pace University--sided with the father.

More than a quarter-century ago, British feminist philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards wrote, "No feminist whose concern for women stems from a concern for justice in general can ever legitimately allow her only interest to be the advantage of women." Joyce's article is a stark example of feminism as exclusive concern with women and their perceived advantage, rather than justice or truth.

Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine and columnist for RealClearPolitics.com, is the author of Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality. She blogs at www.cathyyoung.wordpress.com.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/19/mens-rights-feminism-equality-violence-opinions-contributors-cathy-young.html

CSM Op-Ed Falls Flat with Claim that Family Courts Routinely Give Custody to Abusive Dads

My letter to the editor of the Christian Science Monitor:

Re: Christian Science Monitor, 10/14/09. Author Kathleen Russell

You allowed this author to publish unsubstantiated claims with respect to cases in Marin County Ca, and offering unsupported and erroneous information relating to a theory of abuse of children called Parental Alienation Syndrome.

I am guessing this was offered to the author as an opinion piece and was published without authentication by your editor. You will escape liability for slander on it because she didn't name names but one of the cases she obliquely refers to is well known involving the kidnapping by a so called protective parent of a child. This parent was subsequently arrested, jailed and tried but found to have personality related issues, which is not uncommon. She got a gender discount.

For future reference moms are the largest cohort of abusers and killers of children in the USA. They are also given sole custody of children in 84% of all cases in the USA. Ms. Russell's opinion which states otherwise is no more than that and is factually incorrect. Allegations of abuse are not proven facts of abuse. If allegations were the only criteria of proof most of the country would be in jail. I can easily cite you any number of allegations that are untrue and ought never be used to obfuscate the truth.

I am disappointed in your publication and frankly will have trouble believing anything that appears in it again.MJM

Contact the Christian Science Monitor here: http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/contactus.pl

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

By Robert Franklin, Esq.

They're baaaack. As if they'd ever left.

I refer to the anti-dad crowd whose latest shtick is to oppose children's rights to paternal access by claiming, against all the evidence, that fathers pose a unique danger to children. What actual social science shows is that mothers do far more (about twice as much) child injury than do fathers. That comes from the Department of Health and Human Services

Adminstration for Children and Families statistics on child injury and maltreatment, among others.

Still, that's the main thrust of the recent counter-attack on fathers' rights in Australia. This article is a special riff on the theme, though (Christian Science Monitor, 10/14/09). Author Kathleen Russell co-founded an anti-PAS organization in Marin County. Hers is another claim that family courts routinely ignore a parent's claims that the other parent is abusing a child in order to give custody to the abusive parent. But take even a passing whiff of that claim and it doesn't pass the smell test.

Why would a family court judge ignore well-founded evidence of child injury or sexual abuse and grant custody to the abuser? Uh, gee, I can't think of any reason.

The strong impression these people give is that it's pervasive bias against mothers by family courts. They seldom come right out and say it, but with books entitled "Divorced from Justice: The Abuse of Women and Children by Family Lawyers and Judges," not much is left to the imagination. To suggest that a system that gives custody to mothers 84% of the time and makes little effort to enforce the visitation orders of fathers is biased in favor of fathers, just doesn't cut the butter.

So where do those people get such a bizarre notion?

Well, they usually cite a single source - a study published in the May, 2000 issue of the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse by Ann Goetting and Amy Neustein. According to the website Stop Family Violence.com, the authors conclude that,

"In a study of more than 300 custody cases involving allegations of sexual abuse, 70 percent resulted in unsupervised visitation or shared custody with the alleged sexual abuser. And in 20 percent of cases, the nonviolent parent lost custody completely."

Oh. Those would be allegations of sexual abuse. Stated another way, in 70% of cases in which sexual abuse was alleged, family courts found that there was either no evidence thereof or insufficient evidence to deprive the child of its access to the target of the allegations.

But to the anti-dad crowd, all allegations of sexual abuse are true, at least when made against a father. And if they were, the study's findings would indeed be alarming. But neither the Goetting/Neustein study nor its advocates like Kathleen Russell make any effort to sort out whether the allegations were true or not.

The patently false notion that family courts routinely turn over children to sexual abusers, absurd on its face as it is, is rendered all the more so by the fact that its proponents have a hard time coming up with a single case which, on close examination, supports their claim. The Sadie Loeliger case, the Genia Schockome case, the Holly Collins case and others, are all examples, not of abusers getting custody, but of courts taking reams of testimony and concluding that in fact it was the mother claiming paternal abuse who was the dangerous parent. Indeed, study co-author Amy Neustein's is yet another case of exactly that phenomenon. I'll expound on that further in a future post.

If, as the Russell op-ed claims, there are 58,000 examples each and every year of sexual abusers getting custody, shouldn't the anti-father forces be able to come up with one that bears them out?

You'd think so, and to that end, Russell offers for our consideration the case of Jonea Rogers, a Petaluma, California woman who, so her story goes, sought the help of various law enforcement agencies in dealing with her allegedly abusive ex-husband (or maybe his father), only to be rebuffed at every turn. Rogers then fled with their daughter to various foreign countries. Once caught, the child was returned to the father, Ian Stone, and Rogers was jailed for violating the court order setting out the father's rights.

A Marin County jury acquitted Rogers of violating the court's order apparently convinced that she acted without the requisite state of mind necessary for conviction. Astonishingly enough, Russell would have her readers believe that the failure to convict Rogers of the criminal charge means that Stone in fact sexually abused his daughter. Needless to say, the jury found no such thing and their acquittal means no such thing.

And by the way, Stone still has custody.

So far, the nitty-gritty on the Rogers case comes strictly from a few newspaper articles like this one (Marin Independent Journal, 8/10/06) and this one (Marin Independent Journal, 8/8/06). But it's enough to strongly suggest that we can add it to the list of cases in which, contrary to the bleats of the anti-dad crowd, the mother who cries "abuse" and kidnaps the child is in fact just trying to deprive a hated ex of his child.

Consider the ease with which temporary restraining orders are obtained on little or no evidence in custody cases. Did she get one? Did she try? The articles don't say so.

Consider the fact that a variety of law enforcement officials investigated her claims over several months, but found no evidence of abuse.

Consider the fact that Child Protective Services likewise investigated Rogers' claims but found no evidence of abuse.

Consider that what Rogers was doing was so obvious to one of Marin County's sheriff's deputies that he told Ian Stone that Rogers was "setting him up" and that he should hire a lawyer.

Consider that no article makes any mention of medical evidence that the child had been injured or abused.

Consider that Rogers planned the abduction and getaway over the course of many months, secretly selling her house and small business in the process. Are those the actions of a mother who is so panicked about the sexual abuse of her child that she needs to flee immediately?

And finally consider that the child has been living with Ian Stone ever since Rogers was jailed in 2004 and is now at least 12 years old. If he sexually abused her before, he's surely done so since. Where are the charges by enraged law enforcement and prosecutors? Why doesn't Rogers renew her efforts to have him charged and get custody of the girl? And of course, what does the girl herself say?

If Russell and the others who are determined to keep children from their fathers at any cost, even that of the truth, are so sure that Stone is a child sexual abuser, what are there answers to these many questions?

And why was Russell so careful in writing her op-ed as to avoid even naming Ian Stone or making any statement that could be construed as libelous or defamatory?

I think I know. Based on their performance in other cases, their claims in the Rogers case are as threadbare as they've been in countless others. And that pretty much sums up their whole cause against fathers and their children - threadbare.

http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=4308